Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who helped expose the email scandal, said the inspector general’s investigation was flawed because auditors just interviewed the accused wrongdoers, and never gathered other evidence, before clearing employees of wrongdoing. "Only willful blindness could lead to such absurd conclusions,” Mr. Horner said. Mr Horner said the private emails matter because the ones he has been able to obtain show that top EPA officials were “far too close for comfort” with special interest groups who are pushing for specific federal policies. Mr. Horner two years ago exposed former EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s use of an alternate official email under the alias Richard Windsor, which set off a series of questions about EPA email practices.